Hello everyone,
I would like to draw your attention to an article I posted on the Mathcad blog today. It's a short, interview-style case study I did with a Mathcad user. I am looking to do more of these stories, so if you think you have something interesting to share with your peers, please send a direct message to me here on Community!
Thanks!
Bettina
Here's an excerpt of the story - You can read the full story here: http://blogs.ptc.com/bid/36759/I-stumbled-upon-some-math-today
[...] I recently stumbled upon the Math Encounters Blog by Mark Biegert.
It's full of stories of everyday math – such as "Magic Number Analysis – 'Money Factor' in Auto Leasing" or "Designing a stairway for my cabin" – and many of them involve Mathcad.
Of course, I immediately thought of pulling him into my own blogging plans. So I left a comment on his blog asking him to contact me and we arranged a phone call. The call turned out to be rather short, but not because he didn't have much to say… on the contrary, he came up with so much good storytelling, I actually had to cut him short or this blog post would have turned too long to be pleasant for the readers.
So, where to start? Of course, with Mathcad 
Mark is an electrical engineer working in the telecommunications industry. He has been using Mathcad since 1993. He was then working in the defense sector, and using a different calculation software. His project was giving him a hard time and he was struggling with his calculations until a colleague introduced him to Mathcad, which turned out to be so comfortable to use that he finally managed to successfully complete his project.
Mark tells me he has been using other software products all along in his career, but Mathcad quickly turned out to be his favorite and has stayed it ever since for its strong documentation capabilities.
He says "doing your calculations is one thing, but they are worth nothing when you can't convey your results to others. With Mathcad, I can document everything and easily print out a PDF – this is awesome."
From reading his blog, you instantly learn that he loves math. I asked him if he was good at it at school:
"I actually wasn't a good student and mathematics was my worst subject. I even failed math once. But when I was a kid we had a neighbor who came over to our house quite often to visit my father. He was a professor of electrical engineering who had a contract with NASA to analyze Earth resources from space. He had those great photographs of the Earth from space – which was really something special back in the 60s. He told me that when I wanted to achieve something in life and be able to do the same work as he was doing, I would need to be a good student. It worked!" [...]
Liked the story so far? Read the full story here: http://blogs.ptc.com/bid/36759/I-stumbled-upon-some-math-today
